To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [91]
For the troops, however, rifles remained in short supply, and some infantry units moved up to the front carrying only axes. In December, part of Russia's 7th Army would march to their front-line positions without winter boots. Here and there, Russian soldiers began talking of mutiny, and, once the front line stabilized for winter, they started fraternizing with the Austro-Hungarians, visiting the enemy trenches, trading caps and helmets, and posing for photographs. In a desperate attempt to keep the troops disciplined, the Russian army's high command legalized flogging.
If Russia collapsed, it would mean that the full weight of German manpower and munitions would fall on Allied forces in the west. This only increased the pressure on Sir John French, who noticed grimly that VIP visitors like Prime Minister Asquith always made a point of visiting Haig's headquarters as well as his own when they came to France.
Meanwhile, plans were drawn up for the decisive battle, Sir John's final chance. Although the field marshal surely wished it could be otherwise, in the sector of the front where Britain and France had agreed the attack was to be launched, Haig was his subordinate commander. For his part, Haig assured everyone that this time they would reach the German rear areas and cut their lines of communication. He told a visiting French general that his men "were never in better heart and longing to have a fight." Among the units moved into advance positions was the Irish Guards battalion in which Lieutenant John Kipling eagerly awaited his first battle. Ominously, the attack was to take place near the northern French village of Loos, another coal-mining district where slag heaps offered protection to the German defenders and pithead elevator towers provided perfect observation posts.
In the preceding weeks, John's father had toured the Western Front, thanks to the War Office. Out of this came a bellicose series of newspaper articles, quickly turned into a book, France at War. Kipling termed the Germans "outside of all humanity," rejoicing when he saw a charred patch on the floor of a dressing station where a wounded German major had been burned alive when the building was set on fire by shelling. Noble France, he found, was without "human rubbish" like British pacifists. French soldiers and civilians he met echoed his righteous fury. "It is against wild beasts that we fight," said one Frenchwoman he quoted, or perhaps invented.
Although father and son were at one point within 20 miles of each other, the writer was sensitive enough to know that his son "wouldn't like to have me tracking him." John followed his father's movements through newspaper articles and the letters Rudyard wrote to him almost every day, which included bits of advice he picked up from British and French soldiers: put up wire netting to keep grenades out of your trenches; equip a man with a whistle to warn of falling mortar shells; when interrogating enemy prisoners, believe the private rather than the officer. Just as in the letters he had written John when he was a
child, Kipling sometimes made little drawings: a skirt worn by a music hall performer, a scene from a film, a diagram of how to put up that chicken wire. John replied with a story about a French farmer's pig that had got into his platoon's food supply and had to be chased away: "I don't think I have ever laughed so much in my life." In the midsummer heat, "my visage is the colour of a well smoked briar pipe," John reported. "We look like a Colonial regiment, we are so sun burnt.... I don't think I have ever felt so fit before."
As the battle at Loos approached, Sir John French, Haig recorded contemptuously in his diary, looked "older and fatter." This would be the biggest land offensive in British military history, and French knew his job